How does a PAC report phone banking as an in-kind contribution?

What makes a phone bank an in-kind contribution

Federal rules treat anything of value given to a candidate committee for free or below the usual charge as a contribution, and a service paid for by a third party on the candidate's behalf is the textbook case. If the PAC pays The Political Group to call voters for a candidate and the candidate's campaign has any say in the script, the list, the timing or the message, the program is coordinated, and coordinated spending is an in-kind contribution.

The value is what the PAC paid, which is why the invoice matters. The FEC's coordinated communication rules are set out in 11 CFR 109.21; the general treatment of in-kind contributions is at 11 CFR 100.52(d). This page describes how the reporting works in practice; it is not legal advice, and a committee's counsel or its compliance firm should sign off on treatment.

What each side reports

Both committees report the same transaction from their own side, and the numbers have to match.

• The PAC (Form 3X) itemizes the payment on Schedule B as a contribution to the candidate committee, with the vendor named as the ultimate payee and a purpose description such as "In-kind: live voter contact phone program."
• The candidate committee (Form 3) reports the in-kind contribution received on Schedule A from the PAC, and the same amount as an in-kind expenditure on Schedule B, so the books net to zero cash.
• The amount counts against the PAC's per-election limit for that candidate. A multicandidate PAC's limit is $5,000 per candidate per election; a committee that has not qualified as multicandidate is held to the individual limit for that cycle.
• A national or state party committee reports coordinated spending for its federal candidates under a separate, higher coordinated party expenditure limit set each year by the FEC, on Schedule F rather than as a contribution.

What a clean itemized line looks like

The line the PAC files should say who was helped, what was bought, how much of it, and what it was worth, in one sentence. The bundle calculator on this site writes that sentence for every candidate in a bundle, from the actual household count and the actual rate the bundle earns. It reads, for example: In-kind contribution to Candidate 3: live voter contact phone program, 10,350 voter households, three attempts each, valued at $4,676.34.

The reason for the itemization is that a slate program is one purchase to the PAC and several contributions to the FEC. If the vendor invoices the slate as a lump sum, someone has to allocate it afterwards and defend the allocation. If the vendor invoices per candidate from the start, the report writes itself and every candidate committee gets a matching figure to file.

Common mistakes

Most in-kind reporting problems trace back to one of four things.

• Reporting the payment to the vendor as an operating expenditure of the PAC and never showing the candidate as the beneficiary.
• Valuing the contribution at something other than what was paid.
• Letting a coordinated program run past the contribution limit because the slate was bought as one lump sum and nobody divided it until the report was due.
• Treating a coordinated program as an independent expenditure. Any material involvement by the campaign in the script, list or timing takes the program out of independent territory.

How The Political Group handles it

Every bundled program is quoted and invoiced per candidate at the bundle rate, with the household count on the line, and every candidate gets their own dashboard so the campaign can see the program it is reporting. The proposal comes through an e-signature pipeline itemized the same way, so the in-kind lines exist before the first call is placed rather than being reconstructed after the fact.

A worked example, start to finish

A multicandidate PAC decides to support three House challengers with live voter contact in the general election. It enters the three races in the bundle calculator at 6,000, 9,000 and 12,000 voters, which convert to 4,140, 6,210 and 8,280 households, a bundle of 18,630 households priced at $0.37 per household on the published table. The three programs come to about $1,540, $2,310 and $3,080. Each is under the $5,000 general election limit, so the PAC can still write a check to each candidate for the difference if it wants to.

The vendor invoices three lines, one per candidate, each carrying the household count and the amount. The PAC's next Form 3X shows three Schedule B entries, each a contribution to the named candidate committee with the vendor as payee and the purpose "In-kind: live voter contact phone program." Each candidate's Form 3 shows the matching in-kind receipt on Schedule A and the matching in-kind disbursement on Schedule B. The PAC's aggregate for each candidate in that election goes up by the amount of that candidate's program and nothing else. That is the whole report. The work was in the itemization, and the itemization was done before the first call.

Timing the report

An in-kind contribution is made when the PAC pays the vendor or when the service is delivered, whichever the committee's counsel treats as the operative date, and it is reported in the period that date falls in. For a program that runs across a reporting deadline, the cleanest practice is to invoice each candidate's program in the period it was delivered. Vendors that bill a slate monthly in one lump sum make this hard; vendors that bill per candidate per period make it a copy and paste. The Political Group bills per candidate per period for exactly this reason.